Bettino Craxi

Bettino Craxi (24 February 1934-19 January 2000) was Prime Minister of Italy from 4 August 1983 to 17 April 1987, interrupting Amintore Fanfani's two terms in office. He was the Secretary of the Italian Socialist Party from 1976 to 1993.

Biography
Bettino Craxi was born in Milan, Lombardy, Italy on 24 February 1934, and he joined the Italian Socialist Party at the age of eighteen. He became so involved in politics that he never finished his law degree at university. Craxi joined the party's central committee at the age of 22 and became provincial party secretary in 1965. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1968, and he became Deputy Party Secretary in 1969 and Party Secretary in 1976, when a deeply divided party entered a period of crisis. Under his leadership, it gave up its inactive position between the Italian Communist Party and Christian Democracy in favor of participating in government with the latter at the expense of the former. His high media profile and popularity contributed to his becoming Italy's first socialist Prime Minister, though during his tenure of office he remaiined above all a power-broker interested in his own and his party's fortune rather than political or fiscal reform. Amid corruption allegations in the Tangentopoli scandal, he escaped to Tunisia, and he was sentenced in absentia to eight and a half years' imprisonment on 29 July 1994 for having accepted $4,400,000 from the corrupt Milanese Banco Ambrosiano for the Socialist Party coffers. He died in Hammamet, Tunisia in 2000 at the age of 65.